As the temperature reached to 90 degrees on Sunday, Merle and I spent the morning at North Avenue Beach. We live in Lincoln Park and belong to the Lincoln Park Zoo, so I load up the car with chairs and towels and stuff, drive to the Zoo and park at the very end of the lot, near the North Avenue Bridge and walk home. We then pack some lunch and drinks and take the #72 North Avenue bus directly to the beach. Merle finds a good spot on the water, and I walk over the bridge to the car and bring the gear to the beach. I was loaded with gear!
We read and enjoy our lunch – sipping from our canisters loaded with ice (iced tea for Merle, lemonade for me). Merle likes to take her chair to the water’s edge and has her feet in the water to keep cool. I read for a bit, get heated up and plunge into the water. Families and couples are all around – soaking, sunning, frolicking in the water, tossing frisbees, chatting, or building castles and mighty earth works with toy shovels and brightly colored plastic pails.
Walking out into the water, I turn towards the city and snap a picture that is kind of amazing. It feels like I could be in the Caribbean, but it is a totally urban vibe with people of all ages and colors and sizes all around enjoying the water, with Chicago’s iconic skyline in the background.
This, to me, is Public with a Capital P writ large and at its best. You can drive, walk, bike, or bus to the beach. There is no charge to enter the park or beach. You can bring food and beverage, or you can purchase food of varying levels of expense on the beach front from a number of vendors. Ice cream carts roll by with their vendors ringing bells that signal cool treats on offer.
Now the public policy issues that comes to mind are these:
Are public parks and public beaches evenly distributed across the city and are all facilities maintained in excellent condition in all communities? In other words, is the Chicago Park District a proper steward of our public assets and services?
The answer would appear to be “No.” Chicago’s park watchdog, Friends of the Parks (FOTP), was founded in 1975. They are an independent nonprofit with 2022 revenues of a little over $707,000. FOTP released a review of the Chicago Park district in 2018 and found evidence of inequity across the city. The report listed these issues:
Latino communities have only 197 acres of total parkland, the least of any racial group in the city.
Capital requests to improve parks in Black communities were approved at half the rate of those in White communities.
Higher income communities were almost twice as likely to have their park-related capital improvement requests approved than lower income communities.
Programming for parks on the north side is significantly more robust than programming for parks of the south side.
50% of the money that the Chicago Park District budgets to subsidize participation of needy youth does not get used.
Is there a health related outcome to the uneven distribution of green space in Chicago? The answer is “Yes.” Just review the data and maps at “Environmental Injustice in Chicago, IL – How Racist Housing Policy and Climate Change have Coalesced to Disproportionately Impact Communities of Color” by Bailey Numbers from 2020.
More than wealth and access, deeply segregated neighborhoods often have a significant temperature and heat vulnerability disparity. Heat can be deadly, killing more people each year than any other weather disaster (killing as many as 12,000 people a year). Even small deviation in temperature can make a big difference: "during a heat wave, every one degree increase in temperature can increase the risk of dying by 2.5 percent" (Plumer, Popovich, & Palmer, 2020). Excess heat has also been linked to significant mental health ramifications and increased anxiety... This added heat comes with a host of health risks and financial burdens. The heat is more dangerous for individuals with heart disease, which affects the African American community in Chicago disproportionately (Uchoa, 2020). Many of these residents don't have air conditioning in their homes or accessible public institutions to escape the heat. If they do have air conditioning, they will suffer from inflated energy bills (Cusick, 2020).
This data rich piece offers these three literal heat maps to illustrate the baked in inequity that plagues our city.
The maps above illustrates the variability in heat risks in Chicago. The roof temperature and heat vulnerability (developed in a study by Sherma, et al,, 2018) are highest in the south and west sections of the city, where the African American and Hispanic populations are greatest. Additionally, AC consumption is lower in these areas, likely due to lack of access or financial means to keep up with energy bills. This increases the risk of heat-related illness or even mortality for minority communities.
Does Chicago have enough green and open space? Again, a big “No.” According to the Trust for Public Lands “2024 City Park Facts” report, which looks at our 100 most populous cities. If we look at the measure of “Acres per 1,000 people” we see that Chicago has 5.1 acres per thousand people – which places us at 90 out 100 – not quite the worst record in the country, but way down in the bottom. Daniel Burnham, the famous city planner, offered that cities should have about ten acres of park and open land per thousand residents. We are a little over halfway there!
So, if we just tried to catch up with an average of the top ten or even top twenty cities, we would have to add hundreds of acres of park land to our inventory.
So – like I say, I love North Avenue Beach and ALL of Chicago’s great beaches and parks. The facts on the ground clearly say we need MORE public parks and BETTER public places in our communities of color. Not less.
We do NOT need to spend one public dime or sacrifice one square foot of public land to subsidize the building of new sports stadiums for greedy white billionaire families who own Chicago’s sports teams. If you agree, sign and share this petition-> www.tinyurl.com/No-Public-Dollars-Stadiums.